The pursuit of meaning in life is a negatory one. The more one seeks understanding, the more mystery one discovers. The more one learns to stop seeking, to live in the moment, the more meaning one discovers. Life, in Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir, seems pretty meaningless for Fuki (Yui Suzuki), an 11-year-old girl coping with the hospitalization of her terminally ill father over a summer. People enter and leave her space and time, bringing friendship, pain, joy, and danger, each seemingly fleeting, yet their impact indelible on the development of this young girl. She never revels in the emotions her tumultuous life brings, drifting through them with a blitheness befitting someone so young dealing with an impending tragedy so severe as the death of a parent; Hayakawa never revels either, her film exhibiting a spatial and temporal flow between vignette-like scenes that’s lucid, graceful yet abrupt. If it’s ostensibly indifferent, it’s merely a reflection of reality: Fuki’s life may have meaning, but its meaning is only discernible in the accumulation of all these little moments. They must be lived, then left, for there’s always more living to be done.
For Fuki’s father, however, there’s only a limited amount of life remaining. The emotional strain isn’t something she can rationalize — it manifests in disturbing dreams, morose school assignments, and an insatiable desire to escape. Her home has become a hostile place — an only child, her mother is distant and overstressed, and often as physically absent as she is emotionally. For a film about the present moment, Renoir’s present is frequently in flight: Fuki’s reality is a difficult one, so she’s drawn to alternate realities, whether in thoughts of vacationing on a beach far from her cramped Tokyo flat, visits to her rich new friend’s pristine family home, English lessons that expand her purview on the world, or dabbling in magic and mystical hobbies.
A young mind looking anywhere but right in front of it may easily be led astray, though, and a desire to make connections puts Fuki in disturbing peril in the film’s later stages. Yet Hayakawa won’t even settle within individual scenes — the film is fluid and surprising, and it offsets its light with dark and vice versa just as the real world seldom, if ever, produces purely good or bad experiences. Fuki peruses pictures of starving children from a school textbook in a bright, cheerful room; she ignores her mother’s venting by dancing with her headphones on, or doodles and chuckles during an argument between her parents; she opens a bag of snacks during a harrowing film about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Levity intrudes every time Renoir signals toward tragedy, a touch of lightness that keeps this film both unpredictable and relatable.
Hayakawa shows genuine skill in developing and maintaining this light touch, and the film is best when it indulges in little grace notes, expressive details less tethered to narrative necessity. The image of Fuki sitting behind her mother on a scooter crossing a bridge, gently touching the billowing fabric of her mother’s blouse in the wind, is really beautiful. There’s a striking observation in an early funeral scene about whether mourners cry for the dead or for themselves, a question that’s not as cruelly unfeeling as it may sound, but rather dispassionately perceptive. If all these little details don’t accrue into something particularly impactful in the moment, their power lies in their sincerity and astuteness, and in Hayakawa’s sensitive rendering, and in their meaningful meaninglessness.
Eschewing establishing shots, Hayakawa emphasizes real experience over narrative remove — Renoir feels less like a story than like a true account, lived as much by the viewer as by the characters. Even its most expressive moments feel real, focused as they are on sensations and feelings that engender identification. One never feels the cogs spinning, advancing some linear plot from a definite beginning to a definite end. Like life, it just keeps drifting through, from pain to joy and everything in between.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
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